the country, an English gentleman was telling me about his
little boy, a rosy, sturdy, manly child whom I had already admired,
and whom he depicted as an infant Hercules. The surrounding influences
at the moment were picturesque. An ancient lamp was suspended from the
ceiling of the hall; the large door stood open upon a terrace;
and outside the big, dense treetops were faintly stirring in the
starlight. My companion dilated upon the pluck and muscle, the latent
pugnacity, of his dear little son, and told me how bravely already he
doubled his infant fist. There was a kind of Homeric simplicity about
it. From this he proceeded to wider considerations, and observed that
the English child was of necessity the bravest and sturdiest in the
world, for the plain reason that he was the germ of the English man.
What the English man was we of course both knew, but, as I was a
stranger, my friend explained the matter in detail. He was a person
whom, in the ordinary course of human irritation, every one else was
afraid of. Nowhere but in England were such men made--men who could
hit out as soon as think, and knock over persons of inferior race as
you would brush away flies. They were afraid of nothing: the sentiment
of hesitation to inflict a blow under rigidly proper circumstances
was unknown to them. English soldiers and sailors in a row carried
everything before them: foreigners didn't know what to make of such
fellows, and were afraid to touch them. A couple of Englishmen were
a match for a foreign mob. My friend's little boy was made like a
statue: his little arms and legs were quite of the right sort. This
was the greatness of England, and of this there was an infinite
supply. The light, as I say, was dim in the great hall, and the rustle
of the oaks in the park was almost audible. Their murmur seemed
to offer a sympathetic undertone to the honest conversation of my
companion, and I sat there as humble a ministrant to the simple and
beautiful idea of British valor as the occasion could require. I made
the reflection--by which I must justify my anecdote--that the ancient
tradition as to the personal fighting-value of the individual
Englishman flourishes in high as well as in low life, and forms a
common ground of contact between them; with the simple difference
that at the music-halls it is more poetically expressed than in the
country-houses.

I am grossly ignorant of military matters, and hardly know the names
of regiments